Virtturi Artificial Intelligence GP Project

We’re Developing cutting edge Artificial Intelligence and Avatar technologies that have extensive demand across healthcare sectors, and way beyond.

With the backing of the UK government’s Innovate UK scheme and support from the NHS, we have secured a £250k, 30 month Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) to deliver a groundbreaking Artificial Intelligence photorealistic Avatar General Practitioner project that will initially advise on minor ailments.

Our technical partners are The University Of Essex and the project is being supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as well as the Economic & Social Research Council.

Key partners:

The challenge

Addressing self-treatable minor ailments such as colds, coughs, flu, bad back and hay fever are one of the 5 biggest wastages in the NHS, costing £2bn* per annum. (*PAGB). GPs are currently under immense pressure, with significant amounts of money devoted to dealing with minor ailments (51.4m minor ailment consultations every year). This comes at a time when the NHS is required to find £22 billion of efficiency savings by 2020** (*PAGB).

As it becomes harder to secure a GP appointment and more convenient to search for information online, the core population is showing a dangerous over reliance upon ‘Dr Google’ to self diagnose their symptoms. In fact, 1 in 20 Google searches are now health related.

Misdiagnosis leads to mistreatment, potentially endangering life through misinformation, which effectively puts further strain on the NHS.

The solution

We are going revolutionise the way patients around the world are treated.

AI has a key role to play in supporting future healthcare needs globally and this is just the beginning of our exploration into its potential applications within healthcare pathways. In the first instance VirtTuri will effectively become a triage system that supports key online national health resources, on an international scale. Decreasing the dependency on GPs by just 1% will save the NHS £20m per annum.

Our support from the NHS, Innovate UK and both the EPSRC & ERSC presents an ever increasing desire to improve the levels of primary care through emerging technologies.